TFA gives the example of India running out of ground water. The reason for this is that India provides FREE ELECTRICITY to farmers, giving them no incentive whatsoever to conserve. So they run their pumps 24/7, over watering their fields and depleting aquifers. Ending these idiotic subsidies would do far more good than wasting even more power to condense humidity out of the air.
It would be better for both farmers, the environment, and the Indian economy to replace power subsidies with unconditional money transfers. Then the farmers could decide for themselves what to spend the money on: possibly electricity, but more likely efficient pumps, drought tolerant seeds, fertilizer, etc. Power and water waste would decline, crop yields would improve, and rural incomes would rise.
Japan has 'capsule hotels'. I figured they could be cheap housing for the poor.
Unless capsule hotels somehow magically cure mental illness and substance abuse, they will do little to solve "homelessness", which is a far deeper problem than mere lack of housing.
I have been to Tokyo many times, and have used the capsules. They are nice, and work well when people are quiet, clean, and respectful. They would not work well with typical homeless people, talking back to the voices in their heads, refusing to bathe, arguing and fighting with each other, and vandalizing the capsules.
I have also been "homeless" in America. When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I bought a used van for $4k, fixed it up, and lived in it for 2 years while I built up my savings to buy a house. My employer provided toilets, showers and a kitchen, and gave me permission to park overnight, which was a win-win because that meant I was available when the server crashed at 2am. I later sold the van for slightly more than I had paid for it. Now I am far from a typical homeless person, but I "solved" my homeless problem for a net cost of $0, and any halfway functional person could do the same. The real problem with homelessness is that most of them are not halfway functional, and any "cure" for homelessness needs to account for that.
Sure, because media companies are part of the Democrat Party coalition. But ISPs are part of the Republican Party coalition. So I expect this new entity to be politically schizophrenic.
No, what they mean is they test it by feeding it the data from 1995, then comparing its predictions to what the weather was actually like in 1996.
Sure, and when one algorithm doesn't work, you try another, and another, and another. Then after 19 failures, you find an algorithm that works on the data from 1995 to predict 1996 weather with a 95% confidence level.
The goal, by and large, is to stop the mass shootings and suicides.
Mass shooting are less than 0.1% of gun deaths, and are the least likely to be stopped by gun control. Norway, with very tight restrictions on firearms, had a far bigger mass shooting that has ever happened in America. Mass shooters go to extreme measures to acquire guns, they plan and execute their attacks dispassionately, and they tend to use "assault" weapons. Most "normal" shootings are with handguns, and are unplanned and emotionally driven.
Focusing on the 0.1% instead of the 99.9% is silly when the two have little to do with each other.
If we thought we could get the right wing to pay for mental health services we'd all shut the hell up about guns.
Adam Lanza, Seung-Hui Cho, Syed Farook, and Anders Breivik had no criminal records. None of them were under psychiatric care. If you rounded up a million crazy people that might be a danger, they wouldn't have been on the list. It was only after the fact that everyone agreed that they were nuts.
There were many bigger stories during the 20th century. Even on the topic of corruption in American politics, Watergate wasn't the biggest. The wholesale cheating by JFK and LBJ during the 1960 election, especially in Illinois and Texas, was much bigger, and actually made a difference since the 1960 election margin was razor thin. They stole the election... from Nixon... and the press (mostly) ignored it. Watergate had no effect on the 1972 election. It would have been a landslide with or without cheating.
You need to talk to some liberals. I live in the SF Bay Area, so I talk to plenty of them. Some lean libertarian, and support (or at least tolerate) gun rights. But most lean authoritarian, and think guns should be completely illegal for private citizens. No one, absolutely NO ONE that I have ever met, thinks all we need is to close the "gun show loophole" and then everything will be hunky-dory. Politically, it is always about "just one thin little slice", but the real goal is the whole salami.
Gloves are only one of many problems with this re-tread idea. If fingerprint enabled guns are such a great idea, then they obviously should be adopted first by the police and military. That has zero chance of happening, because the real goal is not "safety" but to make guns more expensive and less reliable thereby disincentivizing ownership, while giving liberals talking points about how the NRA is unwilling to accept "common sense" gun restrictions.
Well it is the justice system just like it should.
Not true. Dragging someone through an expensive and time consuming legal process is often far worse than any possible judicially imposed punishment.
Some assholes _tried_ to abuse it though, and failed.
1. They abused it by spending the tax dollars, and on behalf of, the citizens of North Dakota. 2. There is (apparently) no consequences, either legally or politically, for the abusers. This is not "as it should be".
As a North Dakotan, I've always suspected no one knows the difference.
I was planning to visit a friend in North Dakota, and he gave me directions to his house that included "Drive about half an hour until you see a tree, then turn left." When I asked for more specific directions, like the name of the road, he ensured me that just looking for a tree was sufficient. He was correct.
If we called fossil fuels to accoubt for their cost directly, we'd be paid for coal burning,
Nobody in America is building or investing in new coal power plants. Coal is dying. So comparing solar with coal is meaningless. You need to compare it with gas, which is way cleaner and half as carbon intensive.
Solar City, on its own, had to make up all of the finance costs from net-metering only. As part of Tesla, they can give you flexibility on how to handle the charges.
They could have done all this with a cross-marketing deal. They didn't have to merge just to cross-sell power credits.
You have the freedom to pick who stays in your house, clearly, under freedom of assembly.
This law is about "owner not present" rentals. You can pick anyone you like to share your house, as a boarder or roommate. But you do NOT have the right to pick anyone you like as a tenant in unshared living space. Federal "fair housing" laws apply.
This NY law may be stupid (and IMO it is), but it is unlikely that a court would find it unconstitutional. There is plenty of precedent for government regulations in this area.
Email, Stackoverflow, and light browsing for work. Slashdot for goofing off. If all of that works, even if someone in my family is watching a movie on Netflix, then I'm good.
Who else's fault would it be that Windows requires 3x more support?
TFA does NOT say that Windows requires 3x more support. It claims that the TCO is three times higher. That is not the same thing.
Let's do the math: I buy a low end Mac for $1000 and you buy a low end Win-PC for $500. I need $500 worth of support from the Genius Bar, bringing my TCO to $1500. If your TCO is three times that, then it is $4500, so you needed $4000 worth of support. That is EIGHT TIMES as much.
And the support of the US Miltary is the protector of Middle East oil. What is your point? It is called leveling the playing field.
Solar power is used to generate electricity. Oil is used as a transportation fuel. Those are two different markets. You should compare solar subsidies to tax breaks for gas fracking instead. That would make more sense.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA gives the example of India running out of ground water. The reason for this is that India provides FREE ELECTRICITY to farmers, giving them no incentive whatsoever to conserve. So they run their pumps 24/7, over watering their fields and depleting aquifers. Ending these idiotic subsidies would do far more good than wasting even more power to condense humidity out of the air.
It would be better for both farmers, the environment, and the Indian economy to replace power subsidies with unconditional money transfers. Then the farmers could decide for themselves what to spend the money on: possibly electricity, but more likely efficient pumps, drought tolerant seeds, fertilizer, etc. Power and water waste would decline, crop yields would improve, and rural incomes would rise.
Japan has 'capsule hotels'. I figured they could be cheap housing for the poor.
Unless capsule hotels somehow magically cure mental illness and substance abuse, they will do little to solve "homelessness", which is a far deeper problem than mere lack of housing.
I have been to Tokyo many times, and have used the capsules. They are nice, and work well when people are quiet, clean, and respectful. They would not work well with typical homeless people, talking back to the voices in their heads, refusing to bathe, arguing and fighting with each other, and vandalizing the capsules.
I have also been "homeless" in America. When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I bought a used van for $4k, fixed it up, and lived in it for 2 years while I built up my savings to buy a house. My employer provided toilets, showers and a kitchen, and gave me permission to park overnight, which was a win-win because that meant I was available when the server crashed at 2am. I later sold the van for slightly more than I had paid for it. Now I am far from a typical homeless person, but I "solved" my homeless problem for a net cost of $0, and any halfway functional person could do the same. The real problem with homelessness is that most of them are not halfway functional, and any "cure" for homelessness needs to account for that.
CNN has done a good job of fighting for Hillary.
Sure, because media companies are part of the Democrat Party coalition. But ISPs are part of the Republican Party coalition. So I expect this new entity to be politically schizophrenic.
No, what they mean is they test it by feeding it the data from 1995, then comparing its predictions to what the weather was actually like in 1996.
Sure, and when one algorithm doesn't work, you try another, and another, and another. Then after 19 failures, you find an algorithm that works on the data from 1995 to predict 1996 weather with a 95% confidence level.
You can do the same thing with jelly beans.
Do you have any idea what you're chances are against a modern, mechanized army?
The Viet Cong were successful, and the Taliban are doing pretty well.
The goal, by and large, is to stop the mass shootings and suicides.
Mass shooting are less than 0.1% of gun deaths, and are the least likely to be stopped by gun control. Norway, with very tight restrictions on firearms, had a far bigger mass shooting that has ever happened in America. Mass shooters go to extreme measures to acquire guns, they plan and execute their attacks dispassionately, and they tend to use "assault" weapons. Most "normal" shootings are with handguns, and are unplanned and emotionally driven.
Focusing on the 0.1% instead of the 99.9% is silly when the two have little to do with each other.
If we thought we could get the right wing to pay for mental health services we'd all shut the hell up about guns.
Adam Lanza, Seung-Hui Cho, Syed Farook, and Anders Breivik had no criminal records. None of them were under psychiatric care. If you rounded up a million crazy people that might be a danger, they wouldn't have been on the list. It was only after the fact that everyone agreed that they were nuts.
No. It was the story of the century.
There were many bigger stories during the 20th century. Even on the topic of corruption in American politics, Watergate wasn't the biggest. The wholesale cheating by JFK and LBJ during the 1960 election, especially in Illinois and Texas, was much bigger, and actually made a difference since the 1960 election margin was razor thin. They stole the election ... from Nixon ... and the press (mostly) ignored it. Watergate had no effect on the 1972 election. It would have been a landslide with or without cheating.
Sure... except when a foreign power uses dirty tricks to try to control the outcome of an election.
Exposing the truth is not a "dirty trick".
The evil libtardos aren't coming for your guns.
You need to talk to some liberals. I live in the SF Bay Area, so I talk to plenty of them. Some lean libertarian, and support (or at least tolerate) gun rights. But most lean authoritarian, and think guns should be completely illegal for private citizens. No one, absolutely NO ONE that I have ever met, thinks all we need is to close the "gun show loophole" and then everything will be hunky-dory. Politically, it is always about "just one thin little slice", but the real goal is the whole salami.
Gloves are only one of many problems with this re-tread idea. If fingerprint enabled guns are such a great idea, then they obviously should be adopted first by the police and military. That has zero chance of happening, because the real goal is not "safety" but to make guns more expensive and less reliable thereby disincentivizing ownership, while giving liberals talking points about how the NRA is unwilling to accept "common sense" gun restrictions.
Well it is the justice system just like it should.
Not true. Dragging someone through an expensive and time consuming legal process is often far worse than any possible judicially imposed punishment.
Some assholes _tried_ to abuse it though, and failed.
1. They abused it by spending the tax dollars, and on behalf of, the citizens of North Dakota.
2. There is (apparently) no consequences, either legally or politically, for the abusers.
This is not "as it should be".
As a North Dakotan, I've always suspected no one knows the difference.
I was planning to visit a friend in North Dakota, and he gave me directions to his house that included "Drive about half an hour until you see a tree, then turn left." When I asked for more specific directions, like the name of the road, he ensured me that just looking for a tree was sufficient. He was correct.
If we called fossil fuels to accoubt for their cost directly, we'd be paid for coal burning,
Nobody in America is building or investing in new coal power plants. Coal is dying. So comparing solar with coal is meaningless. You need to compare it with gas, which is way cleaner and half as carbon intensive.
Solar City, on its own, had to make up all of the finance costs from net-metering only. As part of Tesla, they can give you flexibility on how to handle the charges.
They could have done all this with a cross-marketing deal. They didn't have to merge just to cross-sell power credits.
With that kind of a bicycle I'd rather walk. A more or less decent bike starts at $700.
... and 5 years later, it is sold on Craigslist for $50.
You have the freedom to pick who stays in your house, clearly, under freedom of assembly.
This law is about "owner not present" rentals. You can pick anyone you like to share your house, as a boarder or roommate. But you do NOT have the right to pick anyone you like as a tenant in unshared living space. Federal "fair housing" laws apply.
This NY law may be stupid (and IMO it is), but it is unlikely that a court would find it unconstitutional. There is plenty of precedent for government regulations in this area.
but is anyone else noticing that the lock is $100, for $100 i'd want a lock to protect my lock
Indeed. I bought my bike for $50 on Craigslist. No way am I buying a $100 lock for it.
Did it really? I'm in the US and I didn't notice anything.
Me neither. I am on the West Coast, and I heard it mainly affected the East Coast, but my East Coast friends say they didn't notice anything either.
Did anyone actually notice this "outage"?
What type of work?
Email, Stackoverflow, and light browsing for work. Slashdot for goofing off.
If all of that works, even if someone in my family is watching a movie on Netflix, then I'm good.
Because that's really fast..?
At 10MBps, I can get work done while my kids are streaming a movie. That is fast enough.
Windows users were at least half the support time, if not more.
Perhaps, but is that because of a deficiency in Windows, or a deficiency in the users?
If the employees were given a choice between a Mac and a WinPC, I think it is reasonable to assume that they would self-sort by IQ.
Who else's fault would it be that Windows requires 3x more support?
TFA does NOT say that Windows requires 3x more support. It claims that the TCO is three times higher. That is not the same thing.
Let's do the math:
I buy a low end Mac for $1000 and you buy a low end Win-PC for $500.
I need $500 worth of support from the Genius Bar, bringing my TCO to $1500.
If your TCO is three times that, then it is $4500, so you needed $4000 worth of support.
That is EIGHT TIMES as much.
(If you can see it, it's not steam)
Some of it condenses, but much of it does not. It is steam.
If you want to really get pedantic, you never actually see anything other than photons striking your retina.
Electric cars now run on Oil? When did this happen...
Less than 1% of electricity comes from solar. Less than 1% of that is used to power electric cars. A market overlap of 0.01% is negligible.
And the support of the US Miltary is the protector of Middle East oil. What is your point? It is called leveling the playing field.
Solar power is used to generate electricity. Oil is used as a transportation fuel. Those are two different markets. You should compare solar subsidies to tax breaks for gas fracking instead. That would make more sense.